Installing Ubuntu on SATA RAID 0

[Phillip Susi]

I was in the same boat.  It took me a few weeks to figure it all out, 
but when I finally got ubuntu and winxp dual booting from my hardware 
fakeraid raid0, I wrote a howto on the wiki at 
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/FakeRaidHowto that explains what you need to do.

If you have any trouble following it, you may want to reply here, but CC 
me as well so I don't miss it ( I got a LOT of email ).

Sean Hammond wrote:
> So I know someone who has two drives in a SATA RAID 0 stripe, using a 
> Silicon Image 3112A chip (which is fakeraid), and was wondering if 
> anyone with Linux raid experience might be able to offer anything.
> 
> He has Windows XP installed currently, and might be interested enough to 
> install Ubuntu if it can dual-boot, but has given up because the 
> complications introduced by his RAID setup were too much.
> 
> Is there a way to get Ubuntu to install dual-boot on a system like this? 
> Are there drivers available in the Ubuntu installer that support this 
> chip? If so, exactly what would have to be done during install to get 
> them running? He tells me the Ubuntu installer didn't work in the normal 
> way, I think maybe it didn't automatically detect his partitions.
> 
> As I understand it we can't use Linux's software raid drvier 'md', 
> because this would require us to delete the current 'fakeraid' 
> partitions, destroying his data, and in any case there's no way Windows 
> is going to run on Linux partitions so dual-boot would be impossible.
> 
> If there is no driver in the Ubuntu installer, then I think our options are:
> 
> 1. Install Ubuntu on some other, non-raid volume, then install the 
> needed raid support, then migrate Ubuntu. Sounds pretty troublesome, I 
> don't think he's willing to go to so much trouble.
> 
> 2. Rebuild the Ubuntu installer with the necessary raid support, then 
> install. I have no idea what would be required here or how to rebuild 
> the Ubuntu installer.
> 
> 3. Switch the bios to ATA, install Ubuntu, then install the raid 
> support, then switch the BIOS back. Not sure if this is possible or not. 
> Would this work in the dual-boot situation?
> 
> Thanks for any input.
>